“Horrible Things” Slink Back Into Zynga | Hacker News Reader

“Horrible Things” Slink Back Into Zynga

techcrunch.com

54 pointsdwynings16 comments

"They told us they hadn’t realized this was still in their testing queue"

lol, sure, I believe them...

Where I used to work, we used to be instructed to crawl the net for obscure videos that we could pirate and resell as our own. If anyone ever called us on it, we were to fein ignorance and say we didn't realise they weren't original, and 'remove them immediately'.

So yeah, I believe they really didn't realise they were in their testing queue, sure...

What makes it funnier is that they mention 6 and there were actually 8 ads in the screenshot.

Did you work for ebaumsworld?

I wish Arrington had enough credibility so that I could stand behind him on this without second thought. Having been burned by him in the last.fm case (still no apology), my second thought while reading this was "arrington starting drama again". The first was of course "this is excellent journalism". I wish I didn't have to be conflicted in such a seemingly clear-cut case.

("the last.fm case" probably refers to http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/technology/2009/may/Tech..., for any who were as confused as I was.)

Arrington has an inflated sense of self importance. I'm quite sure that, he too, does not give a hoot about users, just about trumpeting himself. I had the opportunity to interact with him in person back in July and picked up a weird negative vibe and actually felt bad about it. Don't know what it was but the man just reeked of negativity!

It's at least worth considering they're doing an A/B test on the impact of removing the ads.

Because scams are OK, as long as they are really more profitable than honest ads.

I don't think that was the implication. "I didn't see it, someone else logged in from my IP did -- you must have blacklisted my account!!" is not necessarily accurate.

(This, incidentally, happened to me quite recently. Customer A went over to her sister-in-law's house to play some bingo. She set her sister in law up with a trial account, and her sister and law printed some cards in color. Customer A was not pleased that she had paid for the software and couldn't print in color, but her sister (who hadn't) could.)

I stopped seeing the "scam" ads on Mafia Wars as soon as Zynga said they were gone and still don't see them.

But these ads are everywhere online. I still don't get the selective outrage against FB apps. I'm not defending the ads, but I scratch my head about the selection of this venue for advertising them in particular. I mentioned it before and maybe I'll let it drop now, but people running rebills and very questionable ads are on Google sponsored results right now. Want some diet pills? http://www.google.com/search?q=acai+berry

I think it all boils down to proportions and intentions. Of course, the two can be related.

If a small % of your ads are scammy, it's unlikely that you will get that much attention. Similarly, it's unlikely that you intentionally are allowing those ads when they make up a relatively small revenue stream.

On the other hand, if they account for significant revenue and you have the CEO talking on camera about these ads, something is wrong and you should get heat. The Google CEOs are usually talking about getting rid of these ads(not so much because of moral reasons as because they are not that desperate for revenue).

Those are really good points. I know enough about affiliate marketing to know that acai ads get "slapped," but these top bidders seem to stick around no matter what.

The FTC/various AGs have gone after some of the people running the acai ads, but I think the bigger problem is the rebills in general. There will always be a new ringtone, grant offer or diet pill to slap a rebill on.

Anyway, I guess I'm not ranting about it.

Note that before he could ever be charged, he checked a box next to text (that even in the video) showed that there was a monthly fee. I think these "deals" are dirty, but there is some user input involved.

Yes, but that was only the first one. If it had stopped after him giving the first site his cell phone number, and if he would have then been redirected back to the game and credited with his coins, it would simply be a bad offer, but not a particularly dirty one. You would pay thirty bucks for a random number between 100-144, and your virtual coins.

My guess is that they made sure to clean up the first service so that it looks legit, and you only discover that it's a scam if you actually go through with it, and if you do, they're just piling on the cash-grabs. I cannot imagine that any of the following services are aware that the user came from a game and that some virtual currency should be credited back.

So the results of this story is that they're going to clean up the second set of services so it looks legit when you're two steps removed, and then pile on the cash-grabs, hoping no-one digs that deep.

It is also really important to remember that the biggest beneficiaries of these scams are the mobile networks themselves. If you've ever worked with mobile payments you know that they always take more than half of the money. Payout rates average at 45% throughout the world. Compare that to other payment methods such as PayPal which charges 6%, or roll your own solution and get down to 3%.

It's a cash machine for all the networks, they have no liability, almost no costs for the transactions, and they still get the lion's share of the money, so they have absolutely no incentive to stop the scammers.

So attacking this problem only from the Facebook side is probably not as effective as if you could force the networks to get rid of the scammers, but I have no hope of that ever happening, all the money they're making on it can buy a lot of lobbying to keep that money rolling.

The point isn't the deals, it's the obvious shadiness of the whole thing and the awareness by the perpetrators that it is shady because they are showing one thing to one group and another thing to another group.

I wouldn't put it past Zynga to do something like this on purpose, but we can't assume that was their intent. They could have been doing A/B tests and put Arrington and his friend into different buckets. IIRC, Zynga are big on A/B testing.

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